The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

From banking deregulation to
globalization, the Clinton/Obama-wing of the Democratic Party and
what was once known as the “mainstream” of the GOP seem to agree
on a core set of principles that became ascendant in the last decade
of the 20th Century. These ideas cleave to the aspirational motives
and related governmental policies that foster the habits of mind of
the so-called “strivers”: people whose life stories have been
cast and recast as exemplars of the “American Dream” of
overcoming the odds and succeeding (almost always financially)
despite hardship and through hard work and dedication.

At the core of this ideology
is the notion of the “meritocracy.” Thomas Frank recently
described the meritocracy as the idea that the most competent people
would (read “should”) get promoted in the workplace, and
presumably, by extension, in the social world. Variously, the same
idea has been used to justify giving a pass to “talent” of all
sorts, even in the face of demonstrable disasters caused by the
application of said “talent,” not the least of these on Wall
Street over the last 15 years.

For most people my age and
younger, the meritocracy is something of a joke. We have seen hacks
take over everything from the music industry to academe, from
publishing to the presidency itself.

Generation X was, after all,
the first generation since the Great Depression to do worse than the
generation before, not because we were “slackers,” as everyone
said, but because of ever-narrowing opportunities—many of those
narrowings justified by the very bad ideas of the '90s that are still
in vogue. The stats need not be repeated here, but ought to be
touched on: American corporations have outsourced nearly all their
manufacturing capacities overseas, content to only own brands and not
actually make stuff; Walmart and other massive retailers have put
downward pressure on ordinary work, to the degree that a grocery
worker is now making exactly the same wage in real dollars that she
made in the late 1970s; and the tech jobs that promised us fun
workplaces and scads of leisure time disappeared with the tech bust
of the early 2000s.

But as ballyhooed as these
facts have been, particularly by the liberal press, the facts have
always been against meritocratic principles. Even in the halcyon days
of US manufacturing, it was still a good idea to know somebody in the
factory if you wanted to get work there: despite what our high-school
guidance counselors told us, we were always better off relying on the
strengths of our networks than the persuasiveness of our résumés.

And here we have hit upon
the most practical of the problems with the meritocracy: it doesn't,
and can't, exist as advertised. First of all, those deciding what
merit is tend to be of the same caste of rich and powerful elites
as have always been in place. Does anyone seriously think that they
would define “merit” in any way other than one that would protect
their own children and promote their own power? For the meritocracy
to work as its supporters claim, “merit” must be broadly and
democratically defined; it must be flexible enough to apply to any
given individual's set of potential talents. Nowhere that I have been
able to find has “meritocracy” been defined along these lines. In
fact, the very vagueness of how it is defined speaks loudly
about why meritocratic ideals have been able to so dominate
socio-political debate. We'd all like to think that we have
what it takes to make it. The meritocracy appeals to shared American
ideals that hard work, self-improvement, and self-confidence will
actually get you somewhere. But none of those things matter if the
very parameters upon which someone is said to have merit are rigged
to begin with. Your ability to survive as a single mom of color by
working three jobs and managing complex familial and social
relationships in order to make sure your kids stay alive are
admirable, but they're not what the managerial class wants, which
begins with the sort of good credit score and job stability and
student internships that your single-mom of color existence most
likely excludes. This is not an accident; it is one of the many ways
exclusion is baked right into the system.

A good deal more damaging is
the obvious fact (one nobody has bothered to point out), that the
meritocracy is not democracy. Our most basic egalitarian principles
are obviated by the notion that you should be judged socio-culturally
by merit rather than by the simple virtue of citizenship. This does
not mean that a company should hire just anybody for any position, of
course, but meritocracy implies that those with merit ought to rule,
and that is, quite simply, undemocratic. As much as I hate to say it,
even idiots have the same rights as the rest of us, and they are also
entitled to the same opportunities. The structure of our schools and
terms of employment assure that this is not the case; in fact, some
complete idiots are promoted by the idea of the meritocracy because
they display those aforementioned presupposed talents, ones that may
or may not actually be damaging to the companies, stock portfolios,
or congressional subcommittees these idiots control.

But most damning is that the
meritocracy is morally bankrupt.

With all due respect to Dr.
King, his own Christianity does not say that we should judge others
“by the content of their character.” It says, rather, “Judge
not, lest ye be judged.” In fact, no major religious or moral
system worth its salt says that we ought to treat people any better
for having “merit” or any worse for not having it. Meritocratic
ideals still perpetuate the notion that we need some system of
ranking people, that what most aggrieves society is, somehow, the
lack of a proper way to separate out the winners from everybody else.
Indeed, the prime promoters of this idea are a class of people far
more obnoxious than sore losers: sore winners. These are people who
assume (with some degree of circularity) that whatever got them where
they are is how merit is defined (see above), and they suffer
immensely from accusations that they should in any way be beholden to
those who happen to sully an otherwise happy species by not having
the same characteristics they have. This is true even if those
characteristics (and, again, Wall Street bankers come to mind) are
downright dangerous to society as a whole. And yet, aren't those who
lack these characteristics, in fact, most in need of our help? Won't
those who possess “merit” do fine even without a system in
place that rewards them for it, as, apparently, “merit” is the
key to success anyway?

Compounding the moral
emptiness at the heart of the meritocracy is the idea that
competition is the means by which merit shows itself. As individuals
compete for a place in society, for jobs, for respect and power,
their talents will naturally sort them out. But even if we could
assume that these competitions aren't rigged, we are faced with a
problem: what do we, as a meritocratic society, do with all the
losers? Is the teleological implication of a meritocracy that the
losers ought to just, what, starve and die? In a meritocratic utopia
are those without merit merely exiled, or are they actively killed?
What happens to them? This promoters of the meritocracy seldom
articulate. It's found only at the libertarian extremes, where the
prospect of a bunch of people who don't have what it takes dying in
the streets aligns with their social-Darwinist sense of justice.

But for those of us who
purport to be guided by less draconian systems, this eventuality is
abhorrent, to say the least. Our moral systems teach us exactly the
opposite: rather than dismissing these people, the proper role of the
“winners” is to use their superior powers—their status, their
money, their talent—to help the losers out. If our system is based
entirely—or even mostly—on competition, we've gone a long way
toward recreating a Hobbesian “state of nature” of
all-against-all within our society. And if that's what we want to do,
then, well, why have a society at all? The whole point of cultural
systems is to increase the odds its members will survive, not to
recreate and reinforce ranking schemes along artificial and often
arbitrary lines, and still less to do away with a whole class of
people who don't “measure up” to the benchmarks those rankings
set.

So what am I proposing? How
about, instead of assuming that those with “merit” will win and
those without will lose, we go about actually trying to create merit
by leveraging the talents and abilities of individuals in order to
meet social and market-based needs? How about, instead of a culture
of competition that drives people out of what they can't do,
we develop a culture of support that pro-actively helps people find
out what they can do? How about, instead of looking for new
ways to rank people, we look for new ways to understand people and
their needs? How about, instead of judging worth on a person's
“merit,” we assume a person's worth through the values of dignity
and shared humanity?

All indications are that the
future will be hard. Between climate change and market instability,
between the flagging power of the US on the world stage and the
dwindling of the planet's resources, we will need to develop ways of
living that bring us closer together, that call on the hidden talents
and the unfulfilled capacities of all of us. For the future to be a
bright one, we will have to abandon “merit” and embrace
mutuality, do away with systems of exclusion and create systems of
radical inclusion. Together, even with our flaws, we live. Alone,
even with our merits, we die.